I hadn't ever tried Notion before but I sort of vaguely understood it was a nice way to make some documentation and wiki type content. I had a need for something like a table that I could filter that I would normally just do in Google Sheets. So I go check out Notion and their entire site is focused on AI. Look at what this agent can do, or that. I signed up and the entire signup flow is also focused on AI. Finally I was able to locate what I thought was their core offering - the wikis etc. And ended up pretty impressed with the features they have for all of that.

Now maybe Notion customers love all these AI features but it was super weird to see that stuff so prominently given my understanding of what the company was all about.

It's for investors AFAICT. When Masayoshi Son opens your home page it better say 'AI' in big bold letters.

Is your product a search engine? It's AI now. [1][2]

Is it a cache? Actually, it's AI. [3]

A load balancer? Believe it or not, AI. [4]

[1] https://www.elastic.co/

[2] https://vespa.ai/

[3] https://redis.io/

[4] https://www.f5.com/

but do they use 'native AI' ?

>> https://about.gitlab.com/

whoa I'm out of the loop, what the fuck happened to redis?

Venture capital

Redis had (may still have?) a billboard on the 101 saying something along the lines of, "my boss really wants to you know we're an AI company", which I thought was pretty funny. Hope this bubble pops soon and we can go back to making products that solve problems for people.

Approximately 95% of my experience using "AI" so far is as something I accidentally activate then waste a few seconds figuring out how to make it stop. What little I've seen of other people's experiences with it on e.g. screen sharing calls mirrors my own. I saw someone the other day wrestling with Microsoft's AI stuff while editing a document and it was comically similar to Clippy trying to help but just fucking things up, except kinda worse because it was a lot less polite about it.

(And I develop "AI" tools at my day job right now...)

The startup I work at is doing the same strategy pivot, we’re integrating AI into every feature of the platform. Every textbox or input field has the option to generate the value from AI. Feature that no one used when it was a simple form with a button can now be done through our chatbot. We have two key product metrics for the entire company and one of them is how many AI tokens our users are generating.

My job is talking like this to but I don't understand why we need to keep any of the textboxes at all if the bot is populating everything.

AI tokens that you pay for?

Mostly the free ones we give every user, we’re just measuring usage of AI features

Notion customer here and their AI crap keeps interrupting my workflow. Pretty stupid move on their part because they have motivated me to ditch the subscription.

They used to be like a really easy to use collaborative wiki. And I used it for a couple distributed projects and loved that aspect.

But I'm guessing their growth was linear, and hard fought, after initial success over tools like Atlassian's which are annoying and expensive.

So to get back to hypergrowth, they had to stuff AI in every nook and cranny.

the sad part is that it wasnt entirely nonsensical to use AI to improve notion's use as a knowledge base but the way they actually used it was in the most hamfisted ways possible.

I'm a heavy Notion user and haven't once used the AI features. I use AI on a near-daily basis outside Notion, but it just isn't something I need from Notion. On the other hand at least it isn't that intrusive in Notion unlike in some other apps.

You kind of have to be or a competitor will come out being AI first and may get a bunch of funding

Just tried Notion AI to build me a mermaid diagram and it was totally useless. So probably not bothering with that again. I can write good enough English without it and I don’t want to sound like generic slop anyway.

Would strongly recommend avoiding notion. They have super scummy practices for billing, removing users from company account etc.

Just read a single interview by the CEO etc, they are all in on AI

Its kind of funny that either this change effects a really small group of people, and its just MS being weirdly vindictive about nerds not wanting to use a Microsoft account OR they have such a problem with people avoiding MS account sign on that they feel the need to do it.

I trust that I can get the news from US Media, and I trust my own critical thinking to understand that the news has always been and will always be biased in one way or another. That bias can shift also, for instance I would say the NY Times is much more conservative now, even while being held up as this big liberal institution.

>>the NY Times is much more conservative now

Well, here's the current, at this moment, nytimes front page stories:

- Negative story about Trump - Negative story about Trump's immigration policy - FUD story about how bad division has become (ironic) - Negative story about Trump - Negative story about Trump / energy department - Negative story about Trump's healthcare plans .. stopped scrolling at this point when I reach a slew of Israel headlines

Yup, checks out, it's definitely conservative. With all those anti-trump, anti-conservative stories on the front page every single day of the year, without fail. I'm sure if I offered you $10,000 to reply with a single pro-conservative headline that they've published in the last 10 years you could surely cash in on that bet, you know, with how pro-conservative they are now. Should be a sure bet.

I like that Trump has not only acquired the GOP brand but also the conservative brand. There was a time that a bonkers deficit, violations of personal freedoms, domestic troop deployments, and expansive executive power was antithetical to conservatism. Now, it's whatever he says it is.

>> There was a time that a bonkers deficit, violations of personal freedoms, domestic troop deployments, and expansive executive power was antithetical to conservatism

President Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division into a US city to escort some kids to school.

That was a domestic troop deployment. Was that antithetical to conservatism?

Was Eisenhower no true conservative?

I don't get it. Is this supposed to be a gotcha or do you honestly believe that conservatives never actually cared about soldiers performing law enforcement?

Considering this was a fairly isolated incident, perhaps Eisenhower was a conservative who encountered extenuating circumstances? Or he was an imperfect conservative?

Also "to escort some kids to school" is a bold way to phrase it.

Am I wrong in reading this will add 20b in debt to EA the company, and not the purchasers? Because it seems like just servicing that debt will immediately put the company in a bad position.

Step 1. Take out a giant loan.

Step 2. Buy a company on credit.

Step 3. Stick company with the loan used to buy it.

Step 4. RIF, cut costs, reduce quality, break contracts, and discontinue goods and services.

Step 5. Sell everything of value.

Step 6. Send that company into bankruptcy.

Step 7. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

I don't understand why the creditors agree to this.

1) the creditors package up that debt and then sell it off to the next batch of suckers 2) the creditors are first in line to be reimbursed if the company goes belly up, so they are fine with it as long as the assets the company owns are worth more than the debt

Nobody fixed that exploit in the law yet?

That is how a leveraged buyout works. See: Toys "R" Us.

It doesn't matter much whether the purchasers personally hold the debt or the debt is held by EA, which is wholly owned by the purchasers.

I'm also old enough to remember not having to worry about this and what irritates me more is - I don't want to be part of someone else's "content".

Still waiting for them to reschedule the Zoom call they were going to do with the community.... something tells me we'll be waiting for a while.

This makes sense, since there won’t be a community left to have a call with if they don’t get their shit together.

Maybe they're waiting till after Yom Kippur? ;-)

But there's other reasons for that - makes support easier, can have same linting setup etc, its not done to increase productivity.

Both of your examples increase productivity.

The monitors thing is funny to me because I love using dual monitors at work, and my coworker doesn't, and this forced AI adoption would be like if I forced him to use dual monitors.

I thought of this exact scenario when I made my comment! I'm sure many people benefit from multiple monitors but some probably don't at all.

The only thing that seems to unite gamers is whining about basically every aspect of gaming, hardware requirements included.

This was sent out to everyone that signed up for today's Zoom call about last week's drama, they canceled the Zoom since today is Rosh Hashana.

In my opinion there is still a pretty big gap of understanding between what some of the long time maintainers posted about last week and what Ruby Central has been communicating.

In particular - the maintainers seemed to be caught completely by surprise by all of this where as Ruby Central is claiming this was just a new SOP for offboarding a former employee. They're sort of talking past the actual issue, everyone agrees that security of the Ruby ecosystem is important, but they're not addressing how they handled the individual long time contributors.